10 Steps to Better ElectionsOur electoral system is in tatters. Here's what we can do to fix it.

By Steven HillPublished May 1st 2005 in Sierra Club

THE U.S. ELECTORAL SYSTEM is our nation's crazy aunt in the attic.
Every few years she pops out and creates a scene, and everyone swears
that something must be done. But as soon as election day passes, we're
happy to ignore her again — at least until the next time she frustrates
the will of the people.

Under a fair, equitable, and democratic system of voting, Al Gore
would have been elected president in 2000, and George W. Bush would
still be whacking weeds in Crawford. In 2004, even though Bush won the
popular vote by some 3 million ballots, the election was still
tarnished. Florida replayed its 2000 debacle with attempts to purge
African-American voters from the rolls, and voters who requested
absentee ballots but never received them were barred from voting in
person.

There were hundreds of complaints of voting
irregularities in Ohio, with voters in some black precincts waiting in
lines at polling places for seven hours because of voting-machine
shortages. Some voters were required to show identification, even
though the demand was illegal. Approximately 92,000 ballots failed to
record a vote for president, most of them on the same type of
discredited punch-card systems that malfunctioned in Florida in 2000.
Ohio election officials may have improperly disqualified thousands of
the 155,000 provisional ballots cast. Bush won the state — and thus the
presidency — by 118,000 votes.

ALTHOUGH THE UNITED STATES PRIDES ITSELF AS A beacon of democracy to
the rest of the world, for the second time in a row our presidential
election appeared bumbling, if not outright fraudulent. Sergio Aguayo,
an election observer and political scientist at the Colegio de Mexico
in Mexico City, told BusinessWeek that the partisan way our election
was run "looks an awful lot like the old Mexican PRI," referring to the
notoriously corrupt ruling party that dominated Mexican politics for
seven decades. President Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Center monitors
elections around the world, said that in Florida, "some basic
international requirements for a fair election are missing."

When elections are unfair, the environment loses. While polls show
that large majorities of the American public favor strong environmental
protections, those aspirations are routinely frustrated by a flawed
voting system. In San Diego last November, environmental write-in
candidate Donna Frye won the most votes for mayor, but lost on a
technicality when the clear intent of some 5,000 write-in voters was
ignored. (The decision is being appealed; see "Profile,")

In
Washington State, after Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi
claimed victory, it took a hand recount to find that more than 700
absentee votes had been ignored. When all the votes were counted,
Sierra Club-endorsed Democrat Christine Gregoire was declared the
victor by 129 votes. And as long as the winner-take-all system remains
intact, the Green Party is doomed to retain the role of spoiler instead
of electoral leader for environmental issues.

We don't have to quietly accept the status quo. Here are ten ways we
could dramatically improve our electoral system. None is officially
endorsed by the Sierra Club, but all are worthy of bipartisan
consideration. Some could be implemented at county or state levels, and
some are more readily achievable than others. All have the same end: to
expand the franchise, and make sure that every vote is counted.

1] HAVE NONPARTISAN OFFICIALS ADMINISTER ELECTIONS.
We should have learned this lesson in the 2000 presidential election,
when the co-chair of Bush's Florida campaign, Katherine Harris, also
ran the election as Florida's secretary of state. For the 2004
election, it was as though Harris had cloned herself: The secretaries
of state overseeing elections in the battleground states of Missouri,
Ohio, and Michigan were all co-chairs of their states' Bush reelection
campaigns.

In Missouri, Secretary of State Matt Blunt was also
running for governor, and so oversaw his own race. In the days leading
up to the election in Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell sought
to rule out (largely Democratic) voter registrations submitted on paper
of the wrong weight, and to strictly limit the counting of provisional
ballots. During the election, African-American precincts and other
strongholds of support for John Kerry were allocated far fewer voting
machines than the Republican suburbs. In the subsequent recount,
Blackwell allowed different counties to handle the process according to
the whim of local officials. In Florida, a highly partisan Republican
secretary of state once again ran the election, as did a partisan
Democrat in New Mexico.

Without nonpartisan election managers, the outcomes of elections
will always be open to conflict-of-interest questions. In addition,
many current election officials are ignorant of the technology of
voting equipment, or even how to run elections. Election administrators
should be well-trained professional civil servants who know how to make
electoral processes transparent and secure.

2] ESTABLISH NATIONAL STANDARDS FOR FAIR ELECTIONS.
The United States leaves the administration of elections to local
officials in more than 3,000 counties. This creates different standards
and practices for recounts and use of absentee and provisional ballots,
as well as wide discrepancies in the quality of voting equipment. Most
established democracies use national election commissions to set
uniform standards, to develop secure and reliable voting equipment, and
to work with state and local election officials to ensure pre- and
post-election accountability.

The U.S. Election Assistance
Commission, established by the Help America Vote Act of 2002, is a pale
version of such an entity, and needs to be strengthened. A robust
elections commission, for example, would crack down on the revolving
door between state election regulators and officials and the voting
equipment industry (see below).

3] DEVELOP "PUBLIC INTEREST" VOTING EQUIPMENT.
The voting-equipment industry is dominated by three companies: Sequoia
Voting Systems, Election Systems and Software (ES&S), and Diebold
Election Systems. These companies develop their own private software
and hardware that is then certified by state authorities, although the
rigor of the certification procedures varies widely from state to
state. Laxness is encouraged by the revolving door between state
officials and the industry. New Hampshire senator John Sununu (R) and
former California secretary of state Bill Jones (R) have acted as
private consultants on behalf of Diebold and Sequoia, respectively.

Chuck
Hagel resigned as chair of Election Systems and Software's parent
company, and eight months later was elected Republican senator from
Nebraska, with his own former company's machines counting the votes.
And Katherine Harris's predecessor as secretary of state in Florida,
Sandra Mortham (R), was hired by ES&S to peddle its voting machines
in the state. In Ohio, according to the Los Angeles Times, one vendor
competing for $100 million in contracts treated election officials to
free meals, limousine rides, and concert tickets. Other vendors have
spent thousands of dollars on conferences for election officials,
footing the bill for hospitality suites, banquets, lobster bakes, and
pool parties.

Even more unsettling, the voting-machine companies openly favor the
Republican Party. The executives and founders of the big three vendors
have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into party coffers in the
past few years. Ciber Labs, one of the federal testing laboratories,
has donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Republican National
Committee and to GOP candidates. Walden O'Dell, Diebold's CEO, is a big
Bush fundraiser who attended strategy powwows at the president's
Crawford, Texas, ranch; he famously told Republicans in a fundraising
letter that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral
votes to the president," even as his company was seeking
multimillion-dollar contracts to provide computerized voting equipment
in that state.

In Hocking County, Ohio, three days before the statewide recount for
the 2004 presidential election was to begin in mid-December, deputy
elections director Sherole Eaton went public with a troubling incident:
An employee of Triad Systems, the company that owns and runs the voting
equipment in 41 Ohio counties (and is another Republican donor), came
into the office, modified the computer tabulator, and advised voting
officials how to manipulate the machinery so that "the count would come
out perfect and we wouldn't have to do a full hand recount of the
county." This prompted Representative John Conyers (D-Mich.) to request
an FBI investigation into illegal election tampering.

At the very least, advocates of fair elections should demand a
voter-verified paper trail so that any recounts would have a chance of
uncovering errors or fraud. We have such an audit trail for ATM
transactions; are our votes less important? Better still would be to
develop "public interest" voting equipment. Instead of the nuts and
bolts of our democracy being in the hands of private companies, the
software code would be subject to the rules and disclosures of open
government.

And that voting equipment then would be deployed to
rich and poor neighborhoods alike to ensure that every voter is using
the same, best equipment. Publicly developed voting systems are already
in place in Belgium, Brazil, and Argentina. India, which is the world's
largest democracy and has twice as many voters as the United States,
recently held nationwide elections, with voters from New Delhi to the
Himalayas, illiterate voters and polyglot communities alike, all voting
on the same computerized equipment.

4] REGISTER EVERY CITIZEN. The
United States has some 60 million potential voters who are
disenfranchised because they are not registered. In most of the world's
established democracies, every citizen who turns 18 is automatically
registered to vote. This is known as universal voter registration. Were
it implemented in the United States, it would prevent shameful
shenanigans such as the Republican-paid registrars in Nevada who simply
threw away the cards of those registering Democratic, and the
Republican challenges to minority voters at the polls in Ohio.

Under the Help America Vote Act, all states need to establish
statewide voter databases by 2006. Additional state or federal
regulations could require these databases to be melded with U.S. Census
Bureau databases so that anyone turning 18 is automatically registered
to vote.

5] MAKE VOTING EASIER. Voting on
the first Tuesday in November in the middle of a busy workweek is not a
requirement of the U.S. Constitution. It's just a tradition dating from
the 1840s, when President James Polk changed the date to make it easier
for farmers to vote. Most other democracies vote on the weekend or make
election day a holiday. Puerto Rico typically does so, and has a higher
voter turnout than all 50 states. The commission established in the
wake of the 2000 meltdown, co-chaired by Presidents Jimmy Carter and
Gerald Ford, recommended that election day be a holiday, but Congress
ignored their proposal.

Again, states and local governments need not wait for the feds. In
odd-numbered years when only local races are on the ballot, local
jurisdictions can hold elections on any day they wish. And in
non-presidential election years, states can do the same, or even make
election day a state holiday.

6] GIVE THIRD PARTIES A CHANCE.
Our current plurality (that is, "highest vote-getter wins") method of
electing political representatives hobbles our choices by casting
third-party candidates as potential spoilers. Last year's furious
battles over Ralph Nader's candidacy demonstrated that our system is
not designed to accommodate more than two choices, yet important policy
areas can be completely ignored by major-party candidates. This
situation can be easily redressed through instant-runoff elections.

In
this system, voters rank candidates in terms of preference. If no
candidate achieves a majority, the least popular candidate is axed, and
the votes of his or her supporters go to their second choices. The
method is repeated until one candidate has support from a majority of
voters. Instant-runoff (also known as "ranked choice") voting was
successfully employed in San Francisco last November for local races,
and will soon be implemented in Burlington, Vermont; Ferndale,
Michigan; and Berkeley, California. With cross-partisan support,
including Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Democratic National
Committee chair Howard Dean, legislative bills for instant-runoff
voting were introduced in 22 states in 2003Ð4, and several more are
poised to address the issue this year.

7] RETHINK REDISTRICTING. Electing
one district representative at a time requires periodic redrawing of
lines to account for shifts in population. In many states,
redistricting is a blatantly political exercise in which the ruling
party manipulates the lines so as to guarantee its continued supremacy.
In California, for example, Democratic congressional incumbents paid
the political consultant drawing the district lines — who happened to
be the brother of one of the incumbents — $20,000 apiece to manipulate
the lines to give them all safe seats.

Districts are
traditionally redrawn every ten years, following the U.S. census. But
House Majority Leader Tom Delay's brazen mid-decade redistricting in
Texas — which added five Republicans to the state's delegation — raised
the abuse of partisan-controlled redistricting to a new level.

America is increasingly balkanized into red and blue enclaves;
Democrats dominate cities and coastlines, and Republicans rule rural
areas. When combined with partisan redistricting, this has produced a
travesty of choiceless elections. In 2004, 98 percent of U.S. House
incumbents kept their seats; 83 percent of all 435 races were won by
landslides, and 95 percent by uncompetitive margins of ten points or
higher. State legislative elections were even less competitive, with 40
percent of more than 7,000 seats uncontested. One solution is to have
the district lines drawn by independent, nonpartisan commissions driven
by criteria like keeping districts compact, respecting geographic
boundaries, and enhancing competition.

While this removes the
blatant conflict of interest in having incumbents draw their own
district lines, the track records of such "public interest"
redistricting efforts in states like Washington, Iowa, Arizona, and New
Jersey have not been encouraging. Most races remain noncompetitive,
because regional partisan demographics trump the well-meaning efforts
of the redistricting commissions.

But single-member districts are not the only way to elect
representatives. Larger, multi-member districts can accommodate systems
like choice voting, a ranked-ballot proportional representation system
already used in local elections in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and
national elections in Ireland and Australia. A state with 20
congressional seats, for example, could be divided up into 4
super-districts of 5 seats each.

Voters in those districts would
indicate their candidates in order of preference, ranking as many (or
few) as they wished. The threshold of victory would be set to allow for
only 5 winners — thus, any candidate winning 17 percent on the first
round would be elected. Any further votes for that candidate would have
the voters' second choices counted, and so on until five candidates
pass the threshold.

An alternative system, used in more than 100 localities as well as
by many corporate boards, is cumulative voting, whereby voters (also in
multi-seat districts) cast as many votes as there are contested seats.
Voters can give all their votes to one candidate, or split them as they
see fit. Like choice voting, cumulative voting tends to foster
competition, more choice for voters, better opportunities for
pro-environment candidates, and a decrease in regional partisan
balkanization. (A plan for a choice-voting scheme for California can be
viewed at fairvote.org/pr/super/2004/california.htm.)

8] ABOLISH THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE.
The electoral college method of electing the president is an
18th-century horse-and-buggy anachronism that enables campaigns to
almost completely ignore most states. It allows a shift of a handful of
votes in one or two states like Ohio or Florida to decide the
presidency. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Representative
Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) have both introduced constitutional
amendments to abolish the electoral college and institute direct
election of the president. Representative Jackson's includes a
requirement that the president win with a majority of the nationwide
popular vote. (If that majority were not achieved, a runoff election
would be required.)

Democrats already have ample reason to support such a move: After
all, the electoral college system denied Al Gore the presidency in
2000, even though he had the most votes. And in 2004, if a mere 60,000
swing voters in Ohio had changed their minds and voted for John Kerry,
he would have won the presidency while losing the national popular vote
by 3 million ballots. That would have made believers in direct national
elections out of many Republicans.

9] MAKE VOTING A RIGHT. As
American voters discovered in 2000, we have no legal right to vote
directly for president. In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court reaffirmed
that, under the Constitution, voting for president is reserved for
state legislatures, who decide whether they wish to delegate it to the
voters. A constitutional amendment spelling out our right to vote could
guarantee the franchise to all citizens. It would also guard against
practices that can disenfranchise groups such as minority voters,
prisoners, District of Columbia voters, and those using provisional
ballots. Already, every returning member of the Congressional Black
Caucus has signed on to Representative Jackson's legislation to provide
such a constitutional right.

10] MINIMIZE MONEY'S ROLE. With
political campaigns largely financed by private sources, the views of
those with the most money are disproportionately heard. Public
financing of elections could open up an increasingly brain-dead
political debate, and widen the narrowing spectrum of political ideas.
One promising new approach is mandating free airtime for candidates.
Broadcast media is the greatest expense of any candidate's campaign,
yet providing free airtime would cost the taxpayers nothing.

AS THE SUPREME COURT STATED over a century ago, the right to vote is
"a fundamental political right, because preservative of all rights."
But it's still a right we must fight for. These ten reforms could
revitalize American representative democracy in the 21st century. They
will not be easy to achieve, because the party in power has little
incentive to change the system that has served it so well. Cities,
counties, and states will be the laboratories for new approaches, and a
number of organizations are already highlighting reform packages, among
them Common Cause and the Center for Voting and Democracy.

Shortly after last November's contentious presidential election in
the United States, Ukraine held an equally charged contest. When the
ruling party stole the election through massive fraud, tens of
thousands of Ukrainians poured into the streets for weeks on end until
the results were overturned. Whether we're Democrats, Republicans,
Greens, or other, we need that same fighting spirit to rescue our own
democracy.

Steven Hill is Irvine Senior Fellow for the New America Foundation and author of Fixing Elections: The Failure of America's Winner-Take-All Politics (www.fixingelections.com).